USA Basketball announces men’s team lineup for the Paris Olympics

USA Basketball studied every men’s basketball game it played in for about twenty years, and a transparent trend eventually emerged. When the defense is not adequate, the Americans are likely to get into trouble.

With this in mind, the team for the Paris Olympics was created.

LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Bam Adebayo, Devin Booker, Joel Embiid, Jayson Tatum, Anthony Davis, Jrue Holiday, Tyrese Haliburton, Anthony Edwards and Kawhi Leonard were officially announced as members of the U.S. Olympic team on Wednesday – a bunch with nearly 200,000 NBA points, 84 All-Star appearances and 10 Olympic gold medals.

“You obviously need talent, but you want players who can fit in, fit in and can play the specific roles that you need,” USA Basketball managing director Grant Hill said Wednesday. “But I think defense was definitely a priority and having players who could lock down and defend a lot of sets in possession.”

The pondering is easy: Scoring should not be an issue, and if the defense does its job, the Americans – trying to win a fifth straight Olympic gold medal – can be hard to beat.

The group includes seven players with gold medals; Durant has three, James has two, and Adebayo, Booker, Holiday, Tatum and Booker each have one. A complete of 12 players averaged 24.2 points, 7.0 rebounds and 5.6 assists during the season, and was 39% effective from three-point range.

“Of course, it is a great honor to represent your country,” Adebayo said. “But for me to be in this room as part of these 12 players who they say are the best 12 players to represent the United States, it’s a whole other level.”

The amount of talent on the American roster is astounding. Of the 12 chosen, seven finished the season ranked amongst the NBA’s top 15 per-game scorers. James is the league’s all-time scoring leader, Curry is the all-time three-pointer leader, Haliburton won the league title in assists per game this season, and 10 of them were All-Stars this season as well.

“The goal is to win gold,” Hill said. “They know it.”

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The timing of Wednesday’s announcement coincided with the U.S. Olympic Summit in New York and as Americans celebrated the start of the 100-day countdown to the opening ceremony in Paris. USA Basketball could have waited longer to make the announcement, but it surely didn’t see the point.

“There will be a lot of interest and a lot of people who will want to join us on this incredible journey that we will soon be on,” Hill said. “So if we know, why wait?”

The Americans remain No. 1 in the FIBA ​​rankings in the world even after failing to medal in the last two World Cups – ending seventh in China in 2019 and fourth in Manila last summer.

They won gold at the Tokyo Olympics defeating France 87-82. Plenty of other countries can be vying for gold in Paris – host France amongst them, reigning world champions Germany, Serbia and Canada – but the U.S. squad is stacked with NBA stars that no other country can match.

“You hope they’ve never played together before,” Canadian Kelly Olynyk said when told about the U.S. lineup this weekend, “except for the last 12 All-Star games.”

Hill led the task of assembling the squad, which took about 18 months, and the whole plan was to finish the team well before training camp began in Las Vegas in early July. Players received the jerseys during visits by Hill or other USA Basketball officials in recent days, and in some cases received them during practices with their team.

“The common theme when we lost was not defending well enough,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr said. “It doesn’t sound like anything earth-shattering. We feel we will score points. We’ll have plenty of talent and we’ll find a way to score. But the international game is more physical and we have addressed that.”

Durant has been saying since last yr that he planned to play, which suggests he’ll aim to turn out to be the first male Olympic athlete in history to win 4 basketball gold medals. He and Carmelo Anthony are the only male athletes with three Olympic gold medals; there are six women, all Americans, who’ve at the least 4 Olympic gold medals in basketball. Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi each scored five, while Teresa Edwards, Tamika Catchings, Sylvia Fowles and Lisa Leslie each scored 4.

James can be in search of his fourth medal after winning bronze in 2004 and gold in 2008 and 2012. His other gold medalists include Davis (2012), Adebayo (2020), Booker (2020), Tatum (2020) and Holiday ( 2020). The 2020 gold medals were won in 2021 as the Covid-19 pandemic forced a year-long delay of the Tokyo Games.

Curry will play in the Olympics for the first time, as did Leonard and Embiid, who decided to play for the United States last yr after becoming American residents. The Cameroon-born center could also represent France at the Paris Games.

The other latest Olympians on the current squad are Haliburton and Edwards, each of whom played for the U.S. team that finished fourth at the World Cup in Manila last yr.

“I definitely wanted that experience,” Curry said. “I think the time is right.”

Over 40 players were considered for the team. Creating a squad of 12 players was difficult.

“I think everyone understands that these Olympics are going to be perhaps the most anticipated, given that it’s Paris, in terms of athletes wanting to go, players’ wives wanting to go, and everyone wanting to go,” Kerr said. “It definitely caused some really difficult decisions for us.”

Durant and Curry said in October that they desired to play this summer, Adebayo said then that he had already committed to the team and the assumption for a while was that if players like James desired to play, all that they had to do was say So.

American men have competed in basketball at the Olympic Games 19 times, winning 19 medals – 16 gold, one silver and two bronze.

Kerr can be the coach of the Parisian team, accompanied by Erik Spoelstra, Tyronn Lue and Mark Few. It’s still possible the roster could change before the summer if injuries or deep runs in the NBA playoffs force players to alter their minds about committing to the national team.

“We have a contingency plan,” Hill said, “and we have it at every position.”